


In Auspicious Circumstances

by Azzandra



Series: Meeting the Parents [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24024415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: This was not how Dedue would have wanted to meet his mother-in-law.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Dedue Molinaro
Series: Meeting the Parents [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1712692
Comments: 6
Kudos: 55





	In Auspicious Circumstances

When the prisoner was finally brought to Fhirdiad, it fell to Dedue to tell Dimitri about her. They--Dedue, the Professor, those in their inner circle who knew about the underground threat to the kingdom--had been loathe to tell Dimitri about her capture until she was securely locked in Fhirdiad's dungeons. But once there was no chance of her escaping, fully in their grasp and ready for her identity to be tested, Dimitri had to know. After all, so few people were left who had ever met the Lady Patricia.

That Dimitri wanted to talk to Patricia himself did not surprise Dedue. He merely nodded in acquiescence. But he had also been relieved when Dimitri asked him to come along to the dungeons, and he had squeezed Dimitri's hand in unspoken support. Dimitri's thumb had reverently traced the wedding ring on Dedue's finger, like the reminder alone could grant him strength.

Still, Dimitri was grim-faced on the way to the dungeons. Dedue shadowed his steps all the way to the dungeon door, and when Dimitri paused as the jailor's key turned in the lock, he looked more like he was the one condemned.

Patricia squinted against the pale torchlight as the door swung open. She sat at the far end of the cell's bench, and for a split second, her posture was haughty in a way that reminded Dedue of Edelgard more than anything. Yet there was nothing of an emperor or a monster about Patricia. The fight drained out of her almost instantly as she recognized her visitor. 

She regarded Dimitri with tired eyes. 

"Am I to be executed, then?" Patricia asked. Her voice may have once been pleasant; there was no real strength behind her words, though. Only a weary acceptance.

"What do you believe?" Dimitri asked in return, sounding sharper than Dedue expected.

"I believe that I would not have been dragged all the way here, unless it was for you to take vengeance yourself," Patricia replied, her gaze wandering off onto the walls, as though her own fate could not even hold her attention anymore. "Execution, or torture, or endless imprisonment. I am certain I have sins enough to justify any fate you decide for me."

This time, it was Dimitri's turn to look tired. He had given up vengeance long ago, but even had he not, exacting it on this defeated creature would have rendered it wholly unsatisfying. 

"Mother," Dimitri said. A single word, with complicated undercurrents.

"I am not," Patricia shook her head. "I have not been for a long time. I never was."

"I do not accept that," Dimitri replied. "And if I am the one wronged, I should also be the one to decide what I deserve as restitution."

Patricia huffed to herself, a short bitter laugh as she shook her head again, increasingly stubborn.

"What shall it be, then?" she asked. "Do you want answers? An interrogation before I am to be executed, hm? As though I have any answers that would satisfy you! Oh, Dimitri... I am not capable of doing right by you, not in any way that matters. You needn't try squeezing blood from a rock. Pronounce your justice, and let it lie. That is all that is left between us."

"If you wish me to pronounce my justice, very well," Dimitri rumbled in reply, his brow growing stormier by the moment. He pointed an accusatory finger as he did so: "If you are in truth who you appear, then I condemn you to live out the remainder of your natural life, for as long as that may be."

Patricia stared blankly in response, like a shipwrecked soul that had clung to driftwood in choppy waves for too long to trust the sight of land.

"I wonder what I must appear to be, that you would allow me such a thing," she said, so faint that her words had no echo against the stone walls of the dungeon.

"The only mother I ever knew," Dimitri replied.

* * *

This was not how Dedue would have wanted to meet his mother-in-law.

Not that he had ever pictured that he would have, for a mother-in-law, a woman who'd spent so much of her life caught in webs of secrets and lies, few of them even her own.

Yet, Dimitri strove to grant her some measure of normalcy even in these strange circumstances. He had her moved from the dungeon to a room in the Family Wing, though with bars at the windows and guards at the door, there was no mistaking this for anything other than a more comfortable cell. He also met her for tea on most days, and Dedue had even joined them a handful of times, as they stumbled through strained and strange social interactions.

Their talks were always part reminiscence, part tragic soliloquy, and Dedue always remained quiet throughout, not certain of footing in such strange discussions. 

One day, he arrived to tea with Patricia only to notice that Dimitri was not present.

"He wishes for us to talk," Patricia explained unprompted, as Dedue dithered in the doorway. "He thinks his presence may be inhibiting us from getting to know one another."

Dedue appreciated Dimitri's good intentions, and despaired for his social awareness. He did not want to know this woman any more than strictly necessary, but Dimitri was desperate to mend bridges, even when they led to inadvisable places.

Regardless, he sat, and allowed Patricia to pour him tea. She poured for herself as well, and then they sat. Silent. Sipping their cup and staring into the distance.

The silence stretched on far beyond the threshold for awkwardness, to the point that Dedue considered finishing his tea and departing without a word. But Dimitri would have been disappointed; Patricia likely realized this as well, because she sighed, and visibly grasped for a subject of conversation.

"You knew Edelgard at the Officers Academy, did you not?" she asked.

"I did," Dedue replied curtly.

A smile curled at the corner of Patricia's mouth, almost hidden behind her cup as she sipped.

"And? What was your impression of her?" 

"Her ambitions far outstripped her capacity to accomplish them."

Patricia looked blank with surprise, and Dedue began regretting his tone, if not his words. 

"Dimitri regarded her as a sister, to the end," Dedue added, somewhat softer.

"I know." Patricia stared into the bottom of her cup, face drawn. "He speaks fondly of her still, despite all that... happened. I suppose I wanted the opinion of someone... less biased."

"I cannot offer you words of comfort," Dedue replied. "You were forced to choose between your children, and they were forced to kill one another. I do not believe your choices have ever made much of a difference to the plans that set out this path for either one of them. But it is still a poor parent, who chooses one child over another."

"I acquiesced to a path of atrocity which in the end served me not at all," Patricia agreed. "I think often of the last choice I made that ever made a difference. Do you know what it was?"

Dedue shook his head, and Patricia gave him a rueful smile in return, heavy with self-deprecation.

"Marrying an Emperor," she said. "Perhaps falling in love was not a choice, but a marriage proposal is a question that can be answered with yes or no. And when I said yes, I dashed away every other choice that I could have made in my life."

"What about marrying a king?" Dedue asked.

Patricia tilted her head, thoughtful. "Ah, I did that too, didn't I? I accepted to be Lambert's wife. I thought that was a choice too, at the time. Looking back, I do not know that it was anything of the like. I must have always been the bait on the hook, even if I did not know it yet."

Her cup clinked as she placed it onto the saucer, adjusted its position. She made a good show of appearing casual as she asked,

"What about you, Dedue? Are you content to be a king's secret spouse, as I was?"

"It is not the same thing," Dedue replied.

"No, I suppose not," Patricia agreed blandly. "You do not have strings. You are not dangling at the end of a fishing line. But you are another king's secret, nonetheless. Does it weigh heavily on you?"

Dedue was ready to rebuff any such questions, treat them as an attempt to get under his skin. But something gave him pause; Patricia's posture, Patricia's tone. Something about her so deeply sad and lonely, some vein of suffering that she had long-buried and only recently unearthed. Some secret pain that only Dedue could sympathize with, because he was the only one she'd ever met who knew its kin.

"If it does weigh on me, there is love enough to soothe it," Dedue replied gently.

The smile on Patricia's face was more sincere than any he'd seen of her until now. 

"Good," she said, more to herself. "Good."

They finished their tea quietly, but it was an easier silence than before.

**Author's Note:**

> Headcanon that when he was a bright-eyed little 7-year-old Dima, Patricia would help him practice his reading by sitting with him and having him read her favorite Adrestian plays, which were all intensely fatalistic and tragic, and also very age-inappropriate by our standards, but the entirety of Dimitri's sense of drama can be traced directly to that. 
> 
> Neither Patricia nor Dimitri realize there was anything weird about that, though Lambert did walk into the room more than once to the sight of his tiny son sounding out a dramatic monologue about the crushing weight of destiny and the fleeting quality of love, and had to back out slowly again.


End file.
